1.Stanford University
2.Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3.Yale University
4.Harvard University
5.Princeton University
6.Rice University
7.Bowdoin College
8.University of Pennsylvania
9.Washington University in St Louis
10.Brown University
11.Duke University
12.Columbia University
13.Dartmouth College
14.Vanderbilt University
15.Pomona College
16.California Institute of Technology
17.University of Southern California
18.University of Notre Dame
19.University of Chicago
20.Washington and Lee University
Lots of surveys, which is problematic (among other issues, you're not getting everyone's opinion. In fact, judging by the surveys received at each school, the vast majority did not fill them out. Missing results are not 100% predictable.)
No mention of endowment
No mention of grad rates
They use student-faculty ratio instead of focusing on class sizes; the latter is more predictive of student-prof interaction.
And they include salary data, which is not only heavily major-dependent (self-selection), but fails to take into account regional differences in cost of living.
There are some pretty oddly ranked schools in this Niche ranking, like Rice at #6, Wash U at #9 and UChicago at #19.
I might do this myself as an appendage to every ranking system out there, because i don’t see this as a factor in any of these rankings:
The percentage of students that are undergrad. I think the overall focus of a university is important, and the more that focus is on the undergraduate, the better it is for them.
@prezbucky I agree undergrad focus is important but percentage of students that are undergrad might be a crude measure to do that. Undergrad focus is a hard thing to measure for most universities apart from the big outliers. For example, there are major research universities where professors teach just about every class, have regular office hours and are willing/available to help and research opportunities for undergrads are readily available. There are also other major research universities were professors focus just on their research, they do not really care about undergrads, classes are taught mainly by TAs etc. These two schools might have the same undergrad percentage, or maybe the second type might have a higher undergrad percentage, but that does not mean it has a bigger undergrad focus.
True. Maybe we take endowment and multiply that by the percentage that are undergrad, to come up with an “undergraduate endowment” figure? And then take that result and divide it by the number of undergrads to arrive at an “endowment per undergrad” figure. This measures capacity to spend on the undergraduate, however; it doesn’t tell us exactly how much the U spends on them.
To get an accurate figure on how much each university spends per undergrad student, I imagine you’d have to delve pretty deeply into a school’s books. In lieu of such effort, I’ll stick with this imperfect measure.
(I’m just full of ideas very late at night and very early in the morning. Maybe it’s my way of making up for the rest of the day. )
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